As the day unfolds, Yang, wearing branded fashion, her own creation, would pose in front of the cameras with several famous Macau landmarks for backdrop.

She is not a Chinese film-slash-TV actress, sports superstar, cultural icon or political luminary; yet, she commands 2.56 million followers on Twitter-like Sina Weibo. Her status makes her a hot property among local brand-endorsing celebrities, a one-woman sales army as it were.

Yang is a shining example of a new, arguably unique, breed of internet celebrities who are rewriting the rules of marketing, branding and e-commerce in China.

Dubbed wanghong (Chinese for internet celebrity), China’s online sensations are influential. They help push products through livestreaming and other forms of digital content that sway millions of mobile-savvy, social media-addicted consumers, spawning a consumer goods market worth billions of dollars.

And this is just the beginning, according to Feng Yousheng, founder and CEO of Chinese livestreaming app Inke. During the 4th World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, earlier this month, he said the coming fifth-generation or 5G mobile technology and new-age tech like augmented reality will help make livestreaming even more powerful.

“In recent years, those born after 1995 have taken a profound fancy to livestreaming,” Feng said.

Feng may have well been referring to data from the China Internet Network Information centre, which said the country had 751 million netizens by the end of June, and 96.3 per cent of them access the Internet through hand-held devices like smartphones.

Most of them love Internet celebrities who are basically of two types: original content producers such as Papi Jiang who makes short comedy videos, and online shopkeepers such as Yang who peddle fashion, makeup, skincare and bodycare products through online marketplaces such as Alibaba’s Taobao.

Yang’s online cosmetics store on Taobao pulled in 2.7 million yuan on November 11, which is celebrated as Singles Day or Double-Eleven (11-11) online shopping festival in China.

Wanghong themselves earn much more annually. For instance, Zhang Dayi, one of China’s well-known cyber-celebrities, reportedly helped sell goods worth more than 100 million yuan during the first half-hour on November 11.

Wanghong’s modus operandi usually involves hours of posting picture-perfect slice-of-life images or streaming similar scenes on social media.

They also share useful experiences with netizens, especially female consumers, the so-called millennials (those born in the 1980s and 1990s).

Yang, for one, offers a range of feminine advice on makeup, slimming and skincare. A mother of two kids, she also shares cutesy images of mother-child interactions and postnatal recovery experiences. This new form of real-time, persuasive, riveting interaction engages consumers and results in purchases of recommended products eventually.

During her college days, Yang was a big fan of fashion. She still is. Owing to limited financial resources back then, she could afford only a few dresses. That necessitated imaginative ways of matching the coats, jackets, pantsuits and skirts in her modest wardrobe.

Encouraged by positive feedback from friends and admiring glances of onlookers, she honed her instinctive sense of what would click as eye-pleasing fashion.

That led her to register an online store on Taobao while still at college. And she actually began to run the garment business in 2015.

Last year, her Sina Weibo account peaked with 100,000 followers visiting on a single day. Emboldened, she set up a cosmetics store on Taobao, which pulls in around 3 million yuan in monthly revenue now. She closed the first garment store last year, only to reopen it this year, which rakes in hundreds of thousands of yuan every month.

But Alibaba has since hit back, saying that it took action because it could not tolerate ezbuy’s alleged scalping behaviour.

ezbuy issued a statement on Friday saying that more than 300 purchasing accounts, which were used to place orders on popular Chinese e-commerce Website Taobao, faced technical restrictions early this month.

ezbuy uses these accounts to place orders on other sites such as Alibaba-owned Taobao on behalf of customers.

However, it was unable to |place orders and check out successfully.

ezbuy said more than 1,000 such accounts have been blocked to date. It has been unable to resume its Taobao Buy-For-Me service, which allows buyers to purchase items from global websites through ezbuy.

ezbuy said it had been facing this issue since November 4, when it launched a 11.11 campaign – China’s version of Black Friday on November 11 – when stores roll out massive sales on the occasion called Singles’ |Day.

On Friday night, ezbuy founder He Jian posted an open letter to Jack Ma on Chinese social media platform WeChat accusing Taobao of bullying a smaller player.

‘Ants on the net’

He introduced himself as an engineer who started a platform in 2010 with a few partners in Singapore. This platform became ezbuy.

In his letter, He asked Ma if the latter could explain why the accounts had been blocked from purchasing around Singles’ Day.

“I hope that we, these ants on the Internet, will at least be able to shout our grievances and not just be bullied by anyone,” wrote Mr He.

In response, Alibaba Group issued a statement on its Taobao website on Friday, saying ezbuy’s act of creating accounts to buy items from Taobao and reselling them was an act of scalping, which it does not tolerate and will penalise.

A spokesman for Alibaba said such acts severely damage both consumers’ and sellers’ rights, disrupt normal business transactions, |and perpetrators should be penalised.

“We have followed regulations and carried out the corresponding punishments appropriate for such acts,” said Alibaba, referring to the freezing of ezbuy’s purchasing accounts.

“As the ezbuy company described in its open letter, the more than 1,000 accounts that placed several orders at one go under a single address and resold them at a higher price has long breached the regulations of a daigou,” wrote Alibaba.

“This is a typical case of scalping behaviour.”

“Daigou is a Chinese term that refers to a third party acting as a channel to buy goods on behalf of a buyer, generally shipping from China to other countries.

LTE V2X is a technology that aims to make the traffic environment safer and more convenient by connecting vehicles to vehicles, vehicles to infrastructure and vehicles to pedestrians through LTE network.

The LTE-based V2X safety technology was recently demonstrated on public roads in Gwacheon city, the tech firm said.

LTE V2X is a technology that aims to make the traffic environment safer and more convenient by connecting vehicles to vehicles, vehicles to infrastructure and vehicles to pedestrians through LTE network. The safety technology using LTE V2X enables cars to exchange traffic information alongside nearby car information, including location, direction and speed, to avoid collision in advance.

LG Electronics said the two safety technologies demonstrated are “warning about cars emergency braking ahead” and “warning about construction work ahead.”

“Warning about cars emergency braking ahead” technology allows drivers to prevent a collision by sending a warning message when a car in front suddenly reduces its speed, for instance, due to deteriorating weather conditions.

“Warning about construction work ahead” technology helps cars to avoid construction sites in advance by sending information through information technology infrastructure.

Securities firms in South Korea withdrew plans to draw investments through foreign bitcoin-related derivatives after an order to ban the trade by the country’s financial services regulator, the Financial Services Commission. The direction was sent through the Korea Financial Investment Association last week.

As a result, securities firms such as eBest Investment & Securities and Shinhan Financial Investment cancelled seminars for bitcoin futures investors slated for December 14 and 15, respectively.

“Drawing investor attention to bitcoin futures could have been a way to cool down the overheated (cryptocurrency) market,” an industry source told The Korea Herald.

Bitcoin futures began trading on the Chicago Board Options Exchange in the United States on Sunday, while the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is also set to trade the futures starting December 18.

South Korea‘s top financial watchdog since November has officially viewed cryptocurrency as a non-financial instrument, while the initial coin offerings are banned under the Financial Services Commission’s Capital Market Act, meaning cryptocurrencies are regulated as a financial instrument.

The watchdog’s moves have been called “self-contradicting” by Kim Jin-hwa, who has been organising a civic association joined by local cryptocurrency business entities including Bithumb, Coinone and Korbit.

“An entry of new technology into Korea is hamstrung by the regulation,” he told The Korea Herald.

The news came after a civic association preparation committee, led by Kim, mapped out the voluntary regulation of cryptocurrency in the nation suffering from a legal vacuum. Starting January, the bottom-up regulation will force a cryptocurrencies trader to buy or sell coins through one verified, real-name virtual account per exchange.

The South Korean government has looked to frame out state-sponsored regulations to define cryptocurrency exchange operators as fundraisers without permission.

The National Tax Service last week hinted at collecting tax from payments made in cryptocurrencies.

Singapore researchers have come up with a way around this – using a tiny nano material.

They have found a way to package a vaccine for a common bacterium in tropical waters, tenacibaculum maritimum, into a material 100,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair. The bacterium causes the scales of infected fish to fall off and their mouths to disintegrate.

The new method will allow fish farmers to vaccinate their fish stocks by immersing them in a container of water containing the “nanovaccine”. It then enters the fish through their gills and skin.

“There is no need for skilled workers, and fewer workers are needed… making it cheaper,” said Dr Jeffrey Seng, a senior lecturer at Nanyang Polytechnic’s (NYP) School of Chemical and Life Sciences. He led the development of the nanovaccine.

With vaccination, fish do not need to be fed antibiotics when they are sick, reducing the chance of drug residues reaching humans.

But the injection method requires fish to be at least 10g. They also have to be immobilised using anaesthesia before trained workers can inject the vaccine at a precise location just below the belly. It takes one person about an hour to vaccinate 1,000 fish.

Dr Seng said the nanovaccine allows 60,000 or more fish to be vaccinated in the same amount of time, and the fish can be smaller.

While fish can already be vaccinated by being dipped into a container of the vaccine, this method is not as popular, as the protection is poorer and a much larger amount of vaccine is needed, Dr Seng said.

He added that the protection provided by the nanovaccine is on a par with that of the vaccine injection.

The team tested the nanovaccine on sea bass, and found that fish immersed in a solution with the nanovaccine had two times more antibodies than those immersed in the conventional vaccine solution.

The nanovaccine was developed over the past two years. The nano material used is a combination of clay and chitosan, derived from crustacean shells. Tests found that it did not affect the health of the fish and was not toxic to human colon cell lines. All traces of residue in the fish disappeared after a month.

Dr Diana Chee, deputy director of the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority of Singapore’s (AVA) aquaculture technology department, said manufacturers that intend to commercialise vaccines for local use must prove they are safe for fish and humans. “Currently, there is overseas research into effective and safe nanovaccines for poultry, shrimp and fish. Similarly, there is potential for the development and use of nanovaccines for aquaculture in Singapore,” she said.

Other ways

There are other research groups coming up with easier ways to vaccinate fish, such as through a vaccine that can be mixed in fish feed, developed at Temasek Polytechnic (TP) with an Israeli partner.

Dr Padmanabhan Saravanan, head of the Centre of Innovation for Complementary Health Products at TP, acknowledged the benefits of nanovaccines.

But he said: “Because we have not fully understood the effects of nanotechnology, there is no firm evidence of how it will impact the food chain with humans at the top of it.”

Dr Seng’s team intends to register its nanovaccine with the AVA soon. There is currently no nanovaccine registered for use on food fish here.

Few of the 120 or so fish farms here vaccinate their fish because of a lack of expertise.Marine Life Aquaculture managing director Frank Tan said: “The current method is very tedious. We are excited by this nanovaccine research which, if successful, can be used to protect food fish from other bacteria strains more easily as well.”

The North Korean government, financially strapped under the strongest-ever international sanctions, is eyeing bitcoin exchanges to gain financial profit, Sky News said on Sunday citing security researchers.

“Recently, we’ve discovered that some of the ‘Advanced Persistent Threat’ groups are trying to hack financial institutions like banks and bitcoin exchanges to gain financial profit,” Ashley Shen, an independent security researcher, was quoted as saying by Sky News.

The cyberattacks have been unsuccessful so far, according to Shen, but she believes they will continue because bitcoin’s increasing value makes it a good investment.

Shen said she and other researchers have been tracking Lazarus, Bluenoroff and Andariel — hacking groups suspected of being backed by North Korea — and attacks done on banks in Europe and South Korea, an ATM company and bitcoin exchange.

They found that cyberattacks, which were usually conducted to gain confidential data and intelligence, have been recently shifting toward gaining digital currency.

“I assume they will do more bitcoin attacks and of course they will keep targeting banks because that’s what they did before,” Shen said, according to Sky News.

“One of the reasons why bitcoin is being attacked is because the price keeps increasing, and we think it’s reasonable for hackers. Digital currency might be easier to gain than physical currency.”

One of Shen’s co-researchers working for a South Korean bank told Sky News, asking not to be named, that just a few years ago, North Korean hackers initiated attacks to paralyze society, but now they were hacking for money.

Security firm FireEye said in report in September that hackers linked to North Korea have stolen bitcoins from at least three South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges since May 2017.

“Now, we may be witnessing a second wave of this campaign: state-sponsored actors seeking to steal bitcoin and other virtual currencies as a means of evading sanctions and obtaining hard currencies to fund the regime,” the report said.

The Korea Internet & Security Agency also forecast an increase of cyberattacks from North Korea targeting cryptocurrency exchanges in its outlook on next year’s cyberattacks released last week.

One bitcoin, which was worth less than $1,000 at the beginning of this year, hit above $17,000 last week.